03/09/04

I f graffiti-style artist Aden Catalani could write on anything, he would tag a Boeing 747 so his twisted script might be lofted into the stratosphere. But last week at a Reed College graffiti competition, he had to settle for a large canvas, on which he painted a chameleon with a robotic lobster tongue.

"It represents fragile, endangered species being encroached upon by the industrial complex," said Catalani, a plucky 21-year-old in a paint-spattered North Face jacket, who tramped about in ankle-deep mud on a college lawn to create his mural.

Catalani, along with four other young men, competed Friday in the first "Graf Battle," sponsored as part of Reed Arts Week, a yearly student-organized event. The battled lured the artists -- some who wouldn't give their names because they prefer the clandestine, less-than-legal practice of installing murals on public walls and bridges -- into the public eye and opened a discussion about graffiti's place in the art world.

Becky Weisman, a 21-year-old studio art major from Boston, and the college's Hip Hop Collective coordinated the event. This year's theme for the week is "interaction."

Weisman said there is a line between vandalism and graffiti as art, but she wasn't sure exactly where to draw it.

"It depends on the artists' intentions," she said. "With a message on a bathroom wall, what it's not doing is creating any kind of aesthetic value. Graffiti on a wall, while it may be illegal, has more value because it has style, a message, and it plays a community role."

Take, for example, Jean-Michel Basquiat, a famous artist from the New York graffiti movement of the 1970s and '80s, she said.

"Some people say these people are doing something amazing with graffiti writing on the streets," Weisman said. "We consider them artists."

Spraying in the rain

On Friday, the hiss and tick of Krylon spray paint cans issued from under a flapping tarp in the dribbling rain, as the graffiti artists sprayed intricate signatures and cartoonish figures. Reed students gathered in shivering clusters, smoking and chatting, as Nate "DJ Gen 13" Parsons spun pounding "breaks" music from a set of turntables set up under an awning. Freshman Stephanie Gantz stopped between classes to watch Charley Newton, a Seattle area street sweeper turned street artist, paint the face of a laughing baby in gray.

"You have no idea how it's going to turn out, but it's totally awesome watching," she said.

Under the tarp next to Newton, Catalani was clad in a bulbous respirator as he sprayed the tangled form of his unreadable signature, or "tag," as a backdrop for his chameleon-cum-lobster design. Catalani started "writing graffiti" when he was in eighth grade and once shimmied out on a bridge over a highway to scrawl, he said.

Graffiti often functions as a means of communication for people who feel they have no other outlet, he said.

"I had a lot of pent-up anger. It was a good way of getting that energy out," he said.

Graffiti or art?

Though the event organizers consider graffiti to be art, Catalani said he didn't really consider what the artists were doing at Reed to be graffiti. In its pure form, graffiti is about both expression and transgression.

"It's hard to call it graffiti if it's not illegal," he said.

Catalani now makes his living in Portland by selling graffiti-inspired artwork. When asked whether he felt sympathy for the property owners who discovered his work on their walls, he paused a long time.

"Mostly I just thought about whether it's a good public spot or not," he said.

At the end of the day, students and artists gathered among empty beer bottles and secondhand couches in the college's student union building as judges examined the canvases. The designs varied, but tangled, stylized writing remained a theme. Judges awarded Catalani a $200 prize.

Judge Duke "Bruno" Pray, a self-described "old graffiti writer" in his 30s, agreed with Catalani that the artwork wasn't really graffiti. Illegal work has influenced a style of legal painting that Pray said he's watched develop.

"The whole graffiti thing, just throw that right out the door," he said. "You have a lot of kids today that have never painted illegally."

Pray said his main criteria for awarding a prize was a piece that felt three-dimensional and included writing that appeared to be moving.

Michael Knutson, a painter and art professor at Reed, also served as a judge. He chose Catalani's mural for the way it handled transitions and because it had a sense of depth.

Knutson said he has mixed feelings about graffiti. He mentioned the case of Reed student Sara Fisher, known by her tag "maul," who lived across the street from him in 1999. Fisher was caught, fined and made to publicly apologize after scribbling dozens of walls, bridges and signs in 1999. He didn't much appreciate her work, but some graffiti-style art, like New York graffiti trains, still compels him.

"Some of it can be astonishingly beautiful," he said.

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